‘Thank you, Adrian.’
‘Your style may not have been to everyone’s taste, but it was to mine. But that doesn’t matter. You achieved great results.’
This time Finn doesn’t reply, but inclines his head slightly to acknowledge such unusually high praise from Adrian.
‘Never mind the way it all ended. It takes nothing away from your achievements, my boy,’ Adrian says.
‘I’m sorry for the way it ended too,’ Finn says, and in this room he means it. ‘For what it’s worth,’ he adds.
But Adrian ignores this, either because Finn’s regret is not actually worth anything to him, or simply because he doesn’t like to be interrupted when he has the floor.
‘So I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Finn,’ Adrian says quietly. ‘It’s come as quite a blow.’ Adrian sweeps back his lank forelock. ‘Finn, I’m afraid Mikhail was a fraud. Has been all along, I’m sorry to say. It’s come as a great shock to everyone and I know that will include you, above all.’
The young recruit nods slowly and looks down at the table, as if they’re mourning a colleague, as, in a sense, they are.
Finn doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything. He is stunned. He knows exactly what Adrian is saying, who Adrian is talking about.
‘Yes,’ Adrian says cautiously and observes Finn closely. ‘It’s a confusing thing to hear, I agree,’ he continues, injecting a note of sympathy into his voice that fools nobody. But Adrian doesn’t look like a man who’s ever been confused, doubtful or even in two minds about anything in his life.
‘Mikhail has been very useful,’ he continues. ‘A very clever source indeed. And, to us, a very expensive double agent for many years now,’ Adrian says.
Finn watches Adrian’s fingers tap irritably on the table.
‘I’m not saying Mikhail hasn’t provided us with good material, you understand. From time to time,’ Adrian says breezily. ‘Of course he has. That’s why he’s been so bloody successful. He gave us- you’- Adrian flatteringly nods across the table to Finn- ‘some very useful material, valuable both to us and to our friends in Gros-venor Square’ by which Adrian means the Americans. ‘But the big stuff which we- which you too, I know, Finn- set such store by, all this turns out to be the fruits of so much KGB inter-clan warfare and, to be honest, it doesn’t take much light to be shone on it to reveal the flaws.’
Adrian pauses for his peroration.
‘I’m afraid Mikhail allowed this internecine intrigue in the KGB to cloud his judgement on the issues that were most important to us. Mikhail’s been fighting his corner in an internal battle for one KGB clan’s victory over another. In doing so, he’s used us, rather than the other way round.’
Leaning back in his chair and at last stopping the tapping of his fingers by cradling his hands together across his chest, Adrian sighs.
‘This part of Mikhail’s intelligence-the crucial part-is, to coin a phrase, absolutely useless,’ Adrian finishes with a flourish, joining his fingers in a Gothic arch.
Perhaps Finn is too quick in his acceptance of what Adrian has said, or doesn’t break into the protest of anger or frustration that Adrian expects, for Adrian doesn’t take his eyes off him for a second, searching to see how the news is being received. After all, to Finn and all the other people in the room, Mikhail is the apex of Finn’s career, the source that has sustained him for so long. Finn should be devastated. Mikhail is the reason he was kept in place in Moscow for seven difficult, fraught and dangerous years. To the irritation of the Service’s chiefs, Finn was the only person Mikhail ever agreed to communicate with.
But Adrian is sharp. He sees an uncharacteristic meekness in Finn’s calm that suggests his humble acceptance of this momentous news. And Finn sees in Adrian’s eyes that he doesn’t believe that Finn has bought the story. Adrian knows or suspects that Finn is agreeing for the sake of agreeing and that Finn’s complicity in this extraordinary story that he has just unfolded is not guaranteed.
So he asks Finn to lunch with him, and this is something that wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been pre-planned; Adrian’s diary is stiff with lunches. Adrian doesn’t believe that Finn is really in the loop at all, that he accepts the debunking of Mikhail.
Outside the terraced Hackney house, the two of them step into a waiting grey car that matches Adrian’s suit and are whisked towards the West End.
‘I didn’t want to break this to you quite so abruptly,’ Adrian says, and for once avoids in this statement his habitual abruptness. ‘But you understand it couldn’t really wait. It’s too important. It draws a line under your excellent career, Finn, truly excellent career. I know now it must seem to be a deeply unsatisfactory line. But it’s not. You’re one of the best officers I’ve ever had, and I mean that as a friend, not just your boss. Right now, I understand, it must seem a terrible blow to you. You’re thinking that those last years in Moscow were wasted. Well, they weren’t. You got hold of a lot of excellent material for us. Perhaps Mikhail was too good to be true. I should have spotted that. That was my mistake, Finn, not yours. You did everything right, everything. You mustn’t beat yourself up about it. I know you won’t, I know you’re too tough for that. You’re one of us,’ Adrian says at last, by which untrue flattery he means, Finn thinks, one of a notional group of exceptional superheroes like Adrian who, camouflaged and with their faces blacked out, go about Her Majesty’s business in the darkest, most dangerous trouble spots of the world.
‘Fancy a walk through the park?’ Adrian says and, without waiting for a reply, barks at the driver to drive under Admiralty Arch and drop them just before the fountain by Buckingham Palace.
They walk up through Green Park, parallel to St James’s in the leafless grey of a London winter day. Adrian is attentive, full of friendship, says how he really wants to see a great deal of Finn, that they have more than just the Service that binds them.
But Finn is still in shock. He says little. His defences are down. Because he knows. He knows that he is being fed a lie and Adrian knows he knows.
They turn into St James’s and enter the white portals of Boodles.
‘Thank God you’re wearing a decent suit,’ Adrian jokes. ‘Some of our new recruits these days! I don’t know if they even possess one.’
They walk through the sitting room of the gentlemen’s club to the small, cosy bar and Adrian greets several other members along the way. Adrian lunches and dines at Boodles with regularity. He lives in the country, but stays up during the week in town and Boodles is his common room.
‘I’ll have a glass of wine,’ Adrian tells the barman, who knows what wine he wants and in what size glass–large. ‘What’ll you have?’ he says to Finn. ‘Something strong, I should think.’
‘I’ll have a Moscow Mule,’ Finn says and for a moment Adrian is knocked off the treadmill of his platitudes. To Adrian, a mule is a drug mule. Is Finn referring to a man with drugs hidden up his arse arriving by plane from Russia? But Adrian swiftly conceals his confusion.
‘Something they feed you at one of your more louche clubs, is it?’ he says.
Finn describes the cocktail and it causes quite a comical stir. One of Adrian’s friends from a City bank says he’ll have one too and then they tell the barman to mix a jug. And suddenly they’re in a conclave, Adrian, Finn, the banker and some other financial big shots, Adrian at the centre, a real partygoer—–a real goer, Finn thinks. He’s seen Adrian in the office chasing skirt, but he’s just as useful at rallying a bunch of all-male lunchtime drinkers around him.
Finn is knocked off balance and can’t recover from what he’s been told. Perhaps Adrian knows he will be knocked sideways. In normal circumstances, the throng of public school City board directors only makes Finn rise to the occasion, to be as public school, as City board director as the next man. He’s lunched with Adrian here many times before, after all. But now he feels out of his depth, his focus is lost, the game is getting on top of him and he sympathises for a moment with one or two of the Service’s senior but grammar-school figures whom he normally scorns for letting themselves be browbeaten by their public schoolboy colleagues. This, perhaps, is what snaps Finn out of his shock: the need to perform, to be as good as anyone.